Research projects

Research projects

Entitlement to Experiment: The New Governance of Welfare-to-Work (2016-2019)

This major research project investigates the important organisational dynamics that are generating major changes to contemporary welfare states.

The first of these changes is the shift towards governance driven by performance; a world of metadata matched by a new economy of incentives. The second is experimentation, new markets and the problematic way changes ‘from above’ seek to stimulate real service delivery change at street level. This increasingly involves international agencies and global knowledge transfer.

The research project aims to model and explain these dynamics using a multidimensional framework and a mix of surveys and field visits, to assist agencies wishing to innovate in order to help those most in need.

Increasing Innovation and Flexibility in Social Service Delivery (2011-2015)

This project explored how tax-funded social services are delivered by non-government agencies in Australia.

As part of the project, investigators developed a new model of the way regulation and innovation interact in public-private partnerships within social policy, including how such partnerships create ‘mission drift’ for both the policy programs and the agencies contracted to deliver social services.

By comparing the Australian case with other welfare systems using similar policy instruments and delivery mechanisms, this project has assisted agencies and government regulators to better understand how service delivery innovation can be achieved without excessive gaming and opportunism by private agencies or the loss of their distinctive missions.

Activating States (2008-2012)

Using benchmark data collected in 1998, the Activating States project investigated whether and how the so-called ‘activation’ of welfare clients has changed the frontline delivery of welfare-to-work services.

Since the 1980s, the presentation and delivery of welfare-to-work services has been transformed by structural and ideological pressures, resulting in increasingly market-driven and target-oriented approaches to service provision. This project compared and contrasted approaches to welfare-to-work service delivery adopted by Australia, the UK and the Netherlands since 1998. During this period, each of these countries adopted policies aimed at ‘activating’ welfare recipients: empowering them to develop job-ready skills, and to lessen their dependence on welfare assistance. The delivery of these policies was typically outsourced to third-party agencies, a significant change from traditional methods of welfare-to-work program design.

This analysis has provided a means to assess the components of the new target and market-driven systems in Australia, the UK and the Netherlands, and to compare the different tools used by each state for managing both clients and frontline staff.

Considine, M., Lewis, J. M., and O’Sullivan, S. 2009, “Activating States: transforming the delivery of ‘welfare-to-work’ services in Australia, the UK and the Netherlands,” in Working Brief (Journal of the Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion), May, pp. 16-18